One helpful strategy for building trust is to develop a goal setting reward system that does not punish team members if goals are not reached. Following a plan that is well thought out proves to be favorable even if goals are not attained. Deficiencies in goal attainment are thought of in terms of opportunities for further learning. The focus then is placed on determining why goals were not attained and how the plan for goal attainment can be improved, rather than a punitive type system that plagues many schools and organizations. A key issue is that a learning-friendly environment that encourages teams to take risks is maintained, and that teams have the autonomy to pursue new ideas without fear of failure.
Failures must be treated as opportunities for learning when building trust instead of many practices that imposed negative consequences for failure. Negative consequences promote a fear of failure, and fear leads to high levels of mistrust. One of the surest ways for a team to develop a strong fear of failure is to have failed often in the past. Repeated failures lead teams to see themselves negatively, and through defense mechanisms, to feel less responsible for their team's outcomes (Hendrix, 1996). Additionally, members will begin to feel that it is not important for them to belong to a team. These types of situations tend to decrease teams' desires to succeed and increase their desire to not fail. A team can sometimes work themselves out of a self-defeating cycle by lowering their goals, but a proactive approach to building commitment toward achieving goals can help avoid a situation of recurring failures. Teams who have succumbed to the attitudes associated with trying to avoid failure tend to work longer hours, have less job satisfaction, take less pride in their work, and tend to blame others for their shortcomings (Dee, 1995).
Mutual trust is the foundation for high-performance teamwork and cooperation. If team members do not trust each other, they will hold back on the needed cooperation for reaching high-performance (DuBrin, 1995). Trust is the "glue" that holds everything else together (Covey, 1990), and encouraging team members to give honest feedback during team meetings and communication is one way of building trust. Trust results from candor because openly expressing opinions leads team members to believe that opinions are expressed openly instead of being hidden. Another trust builder is for team members to fully disclose the type of work they are performing outside of shared team activities.
The lack of trust among teams and schools causes contortions in the system and acts either as an accelerator of negative processes, or as a delay factor in positive processes. Identifying a lack of trust and attempting to correct it can be one powerful strategy for building teams and learning organizations. Fixing a lack of trust requires identifying it in its context (system) and changing the processes that accelerate it.
Figure 4. A system depicting a process of acquiring information and its transformation to knowledge, and a delay mechanism from those without access to information.
High-performance technology teams are dependent upon the belief and confidence in their school system's integrity and reliability for doing their work (Lipnack & Stamps, 1997). Access to information is crucial to teams being able to perform their work. Information that is not available to everyone promotes a climate of skepticism and accelerates a lack of trust in the system. Teams need to establish a strong level of trust in each other's competence, and a strong degree of competence is required among individuals of high-performing teams, or the result is less than the sum of its parts. In most cases competence levels increase as the team works together. When team members work together in helping each other acquire skills and competencies, trust in competence of fellow team members becomes natural because all team members have first hand knowledge of each other's commitment and skill levels.
Characteristics of High Levels of Trust
Checklist for Building Trust
Cautions When Building Trust
$ Resist having too many activities outside of the normal work time. Team meetings, team luncheons, and after-hour get-togethers are all important for establishing relationships and trust, but teams need to be careful not to intensify the expanding workweek more than what is reasonable.
$ Resist the assumption that all the information the team needs exists within the team. Extend trust to others outside of the team.
$ Resist engaging in elaborate team functions without high levels of trust. The collective strengths of the team will expose the individual weaknesses of team members. Without trust it is difficult for the team to be supportive enough to take the "sting" out of exposing individual deficiencies.
Adapted from DuBrin, 1995.
Last updated: March 10, 1998